20 Jan Make Your Website Consumer Friendly
Your company website is your face to consumers-it is your online storefront and must be cared for from a presentation standpoint just as one would care for a brick and mortar storefront. Attention to detail is critical in ensuring that the consumer has a positive experience and wants to come back for more of what you have to offer. Here, we provide six tips for doing just that.
Select the right e-commerce platform. This is one of the most important decisions a business will make pertaining to the website. Having an e-commerce platform that is user-friendly, intuitive, and displays products in a premium-looking manner is important. Image is everything online, and if your site functions or looks less than premium, it doesn’t matter how great your products are-it will be harder to gain the customer’s interest and trust.
Slow load times make for unhappy customers. Make sure your website and the pages within are built to load quickly. Slow load times are a real drag and often lead to an impatient customer going elsewhere. This means, among other things, ensuring that the pages’ graphics are in the right format, size, and are properly compressed. Search engines don’t like slow load times, either – where you fall in search results can be significantly impacted by this. Learn more about reducing page load times here.
Navigation is critical. Make sure you have a clear navigation for your website and that it is present on every page. It is also important to ensure that nothing is too many clicks away. The harder your products are to get to, the less likely it is that consumers will be patient enough to get in there and buy. No one likes having to click through endless marketing pages only to get to a product they don’t want and have to start all over again to find something they do want.
Integrate social media. These days, many people like to go deeper with a brand, to further engage with the community of people who, like them, like your product. Customers also often like to post feedback and feel like they are contributing to a brand’s growth and knowledge. So make sure you integrate the key social media icons and widgets into your website. Studies show that those Facebook fans are going to be much more inclined to buy your products than others, so they are worth garnering and taking care of!* Be sure to respond to their comments, as well. Neglected social media is a no-no!
Content is key. Provide a reason for consumers to come back! Not only should the content on your site be engaging and informative (while also being concise-too much copy can be burdensome), but you should also have a blog that is updated with some frequency. Give customers a reason to come back with interesting blog content-the content doesn’t have to be entirely related to what you are doing or selling. You can also write about new product offerings and attract attention to products that are on sale.
Make sure that your contact information is easy to find. There is nothing more frustrating than needing to speak to customer service and having to dig through a website to find the contact information. Having this information buried is a quick way to lose favorability with a customer.
To summarize, don’t take for granted that your customer will look past a subpar experience on your website. A first impression means everything, and if the customer has a tough time finding products, being able to reach you, or deduces that you have a low-end offering because your site looks low-end, then you may lose them on the first shot to someone who does offer these things.
*http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/Facebook-Fans-More-Likely-to-Recommend-a-Brand-Buy-Products-77616.aspx
Cara Aley is a freelance writer who covers a wide variety of topics from mobile payment options to health and wellness.
